The Sun recently interviewed Gov. Charlie Baker on the topic of the opioid epidemic in Massachusetts and the entire New England region. Here is a transcript of some of that interview:

What moments stick out to you from the time you've spent so far tackling the opioid epidemic?

BAKER: I attended a Learn to Cope meeting ... in Cambridge and it was just a very emotional but very informative evening. One of the things that was very interesting about it was there was a guy there who said he was from Salem. The reason he started coming to the Cambridge Learn to Cope meetings, even though there was a group up in Salem, was he didn't want to run into anybody he knew. It was this whole stigma thing. And he walked into his first meeting in Cambridge and there were two people there that he knew from Salem. It was fairly common for people to seek out and go to Learn to Cope meetings in places other than where they lived. So even in situations where you knew everybody who was there was somebody who was dealing with this issue, there's still a tremendous amount of hesitancy and sort of shame, for lack of a better word, about being part of the community that's trying to deal with this issue. You combine that with the sort of desperation and the love and the agony that these people are going through and it's just one more part of the burden, which is this problem of having people view your son or your daughter's problem as a character flaw.

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In terms of enacting legislation to help curb the opioid epidemic, could the last two years have gone better?

BAKER: The effort that a lot of us have made to publicize the downside associated with some of these pain meds is a good thing. But if you look at a lot of stuff that was in the legislation it's going to take a while to get coaches and parents and sports across our middle schools and high schools completely acclimated to what's going on here with respect to pain medication. It's going to take a while for the seven-day limit (on opioids a physician can prescribe to a new patient) to ultimately acclimate. It's obviously taking a while to get prescribers to sign up and use the prescription monitoring program. We just cut the deal earlier this year for the medical schools and the dental schools to develop an opioid curriculum that's a requirement to graduate. The first class that was actually required to take it and graduate was the class at the UMass Medical class that I spoke at this year at their graduation. Many of these elements are sort of just going to start taking root now. And I do think that we're doing a lot of the right things based on the task force report and conversations I've had with people since then. But I'm pretty clear-eyed about the fact that some of this is just going to take awhile to sink in and settle and kind of move the number in the way we want to. And the other curve ball, and it's a deadly one that's sort of been tossed into the mix with all this, is the arrival of fentanyl.

Are you considering any other opioid legislation at the moment?

BAKER: Most of our effort is making sure that we maximize the tools we were given by the Legislature and by others ... To me, I don't want this stuff to get implemented half heartedly. For this stuff to matter and to mean something and to accomplish what we all would like it to accomplish, it needs focus and it needs persistence. One of the things that sometimes happens on these big issues that have a big, broad arc over time is people do these things that are sort of a policy base and then they run off and start working on another set of policy things. I want to make sure we max and leverage the stuff we all agreed would really make a difference. And certainly that's going to be our focus between now and the time the Legislature comes back. And I would anticipate that if we were going to file additional legislation it probably wouldn't be until next spring.

You've expressed frustration in the past at the lack of action on this issue at the federal level. What would you like to see done?

BAKER: They have health centers all over the country that are federally qualified health centers and they can support those health centers .... they can also bring what I would describe as the best available research and practices around what works on the treatment and recovery piece, into play. They control the (National Institute of Health) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration and they can also create programming through the Medicaid program ... (that) can make it easier to do things at the state level with treatment and recovery around MassHealth and around Medicaid ... We basically brought the medical and the dental schools in and talked with them and worked with them and got them to agree to create a curriculum around opioid therapy. The federal government pays for a big piece of medical and dental school education in this country as well as pharmacy school and nursing school and a bunch of other things. If they were to just say 'We want this to be a standard part of the core curriculum at any educational institution that we fund,' it would have a huge impact ... Same goes for the feds ability to invest in research around this stuff and determine which treatment models work best and where they would like to see people go with regard to that.

According to the Department of Public Health, fentanyl was present in more than half of the overdose deaths last year. Is there anything we can do that's not being done about that particular substance?

BAKER: I would say that the most important thing we can do with respect to this is to try and educate -- and use the channels, both informal and formal, that are available -- to make sure that people who are dealing with folks who are dealing with addiction are as versed and up to date as they can be about the dangers of fentanyl and why this really lethal mix of fentanyl and heroin is ever-more prevalent out there. Fentanyl in particular makes it very hard for Narcan to be successful in reviving somebody who is dealing with an overdose. You talk about the success rates associated with Narcan -- and thank God it's there because we would have lost five or six thousand people instead of 1,500 in 2015 without it -- it's pretty clear that fentanyl is a game changer with respect to Narcan's effectiveness, and people need to understand that.

You've spoken quite a bit about how you're inspired by families you've met around the state who have grappled with addiction. What do families say to you these days, now that some legislation has been passed?

BAKER: They say three things to me. The first is 'Thank you for speaking so openly and directly about this, it makes it easier for us to talk about it.' Which for many families is very important ... The second thing I hear from families is a lot of stories that back up and support the stuff we've done. You know, I've talked to a lot of people who told me how they ended up here, or how their family member ended up here, and more often than not it typically involves people who got into this through prescription paid meds of one type or another ... The third thing I hear is the stories I've always heard about how difficult it is, once somebody is dealing with this, to get off it. And we all need to understand and respect the fact that once you're dealing with an opioid addiction, the process and the complexity associated with resolving that and getting clean and staying clean is very hard.

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